The Cutthroat

“It also spends money hand over fist, which was fine as long as we filled the theaters. Now that we’re playing to some empty seats…”

“If Mother catches wind of this,” said Jeff Deaver.

“Don’t say it,” said Joe Deaver.

While the theatrical angels appeared fabulously wealthy to working actors and three-dollar-a-day stagehands, they actually existed on an allowance. It was generous enough to live large, but under the authority of Grandfather’s will, which compelled them to take the Deaver family name instead of their father’s, their mother held the purse strings. Since Mother blamed the theater for the showgirls who had seduced Father repeatedly, she would never release the next year’s allowance if she learned that they had lost this year’s investing in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“I will slit that damned reporter’s throat and shove his leg through it,” said Jeff.

Joe had no doubt that Jeff would kill the reporter if opportunity arose, or he might even create the opportunity. “Don’t,” he said. “Even Mother would catch wind of that newspaper report.”

Mother was holed up in the family’s Lower Merion Main Line estate. The only visitors to her fifty rooms and two hundred acres — which Joe and Jeff dreamed of one day inheriting to subdivide — were her bankers and her priest.

“What’s this about Treasure Island? We don’t have any money for another play.”

“Which is why,” Joe explained patiently, “we will maneuver Mr. Isaac Bell into buying into our investment in Jekyll and Hyde. If these murdered girls sink us, we’ll at least get some of our money out.”

“But why would Bell invest in Jekyll and Hyde when the papers are full of murdered girls?”

Joe Deaver said, “Partly to involve Barrett & Buchanan in his pipe dreams for Treasure Island and partly to secure employment in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for a friend.”

Jeff Deaver grinned. At last, a motive he could understand. “Sounds like the insurance man fell for an actress.”

“Helen,” said Joe. “An attractive brunette who knows how to wear a gown. Bell claims she was a scholarship girl at Bryn Mawr who got taken under the wing of one of his investors.”

“A likely story.”

Joe shook his head emphatically. “Bell is as straitlaced as you’d expect of an insurance man. And I’m sorry to say Helen doesn’t come across as your average chorus girl on the make.”

“What part does she want?”

“Mr. Bell believes she should replace Barbara.”

“Barbara? No! Barbara makes a crackerjacks job of it. How do we know Bell’s friend is up to doing ‘general businesswoman’?”

Joe was running out of patience. He answered sharply.

“Your Barbara is paid twenty bucks a week to dust Jekyll’s library in one scene; speak the line ‘Mr. Hyde hasn’t come home yet, Dr. Jekyll’ in another; and get strangled any evening one of the regulars catches a cold. If Isaac Bell will cover half of our investment, I guarantee his friend Helen will be up to it.”

* * *

A Baltimore & Ohio fast freight from Pittsburgh slowed to enter the Cincinnati yards. A hobo dropped from a boxcar. A railroad detective ran after him with a billy club.

“Come here, you!”

Harry Warren did as he was told. His clothes were grimy, his hands and face smeared with coal soot, but a cop with a sharper eye might have noticed that he was fitter, stronger, and better fed than most who rode the rails.

“Where you think you’re going?”

“Hoping for Frisco.”

“You got yourself a long walk. And a busted head for stealing rides.” The yard bull whipped his billy skyward. “Tell your friends Cincinnati is off-limits.”

“Do you really want to try that?”

Warren’s tone was almost conversational. He waited for the yard bull to reconsider, but the man swung at him anyway. Seasoned hickory whistled. Parting the air that Harry Warren’s skull had occupied an instant earlier, the brutal blow ended up as a wild swing angled across the rail cop’s torso. When it smacked the gravel by his left foot, he was off balance, with his right side exposed.

Four inches of lead pipe had materialized in Harry Warren’s hand. He gauged his opportunity and applied the pipe to the yard bull’s skull well above his vulnerable temple with a force precisely calculated to flatten him facedown, head ringing, and legs too shaky to try to stand for several minutes.

“Which way’s the Lyric Theatre?”

“Huh?”

“The Lyric. Where they show Alias Jimmy Valentine. It’s about a detective trying to mistreat an innocent safecracker.”

An angry thumb gestured a route into the freight district.